Microsoft Layoffs

Microsoft is planning to shed thousands of jobs in what could be the largest round of layoffs in its history, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing anonymous people familiar with the company’s plans.

Microsoft, Redmond, Wash., will likely cut jobs from its marketing and engineering teams, as well as from its Nokia handset unit, which it acquired for $7.2 billion in a deal that closed in April, Bloomberg reported.

The layoffs will probably be more painful in Finland than here or anywhere else but still Proof positive there’s a STEM shortage!

Your crack about the STEM shortage reminds me of something I saw on CNBC or Fox Business Channel a year or so back. (Probably longer ago than that, after reading what I wrote.) A business owner was lamenting that they couldn’t find aerospace engineers to work for his aerospace branch. The office in question was in St Augustine FL, not that far up the coast from the Kennedy Space Center, which had just shuttered most of his operations, leaving a significant number of aerospace engineers out of work. The anchor did not pick up on this.

So they’re laying off 18,000 people, around 14% of their workforce. 12,500 jobs will be eliminated from recently acquired Nokia, with the other 5,500 coming from the old business.

Note that the previous biggest layoff at Microsoft was only 5,000 people, and that occurred in 2009 during the worst of the recession. (Allegedly that was the first mass layoff in the company’s history.)

Of course, they’re going to grow their business by shedding all these employees, and buying failing companies.

Can someone tell me again why the underwear gnomes business model was bad? It’s seems better than Microsoft’s new plan.

For that matter, looking at comments elsewhere, I’m wondering if Microsoft bought Nokia so they could distract people from the 5,500 they’re laying off in their ‘core’ business. People are missing that that number represents a 10% larger layoff than the previous biggest one in company history. It might be worth it to stock holders to waste a few billion on acquiring a loser like Nokia in order to hide the rot in the core business.

The Nokia purchase was part of Ballmer’s Windows 8 strategy. Since nobody would sell Windows 8 phones, he bought Nokia to produce Windows 8 phones. The reason nobody produced Windows 8 phones was because nobody was buying Windows 8 phones.

Steve Ballmer decided that Apple was successful because Apple has a take it or leave it policy when it comes to their products. No matter what your opinion of Apple or Apple products, Microsoft ain’t Apple, and Microsoft customers ain’t Apple customers. More importantly, Steve Ballmer ain’t Steve Jobs.

Dumb or semi-retarded cell phones are not going away. In un/under-developed areas, they will be needed for a long time, and not all of us want to be tracked 24/7.

As pointed out elsewhere, this layoff (5,500 presumably mostly in North America, and at least 1,200 of them are) comes about a week after Bill Gates was pleading for more tech workers to be let into the country.